Welcome to CE Stoicism

Though formal definitions of life rarely list aims as a distinguishing feature, they are one.

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Aims are not work, but rather how work gets focused, directed, or channeled - in a word, constrained.

Later we'll explore in depth the relationship between energy, work, and aims. For now, we'll make this distinction: Energy is the potential to do work. Work occurs when things interact that happen aimlessly in the realm of nonselves, for example, molecules interacting and doing work on one another.

Aimed work is energetic interaction that serve a self. Of all the work that could occur, in selves the range of work is constrained, limited, or restricted such that it is of value or significance for the self with respect to or about its circumstances.

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... We know a self's aims by the functionally constrained work it does. The aim is how the wider range of possible work is narrowed to work that benefits the self.

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Aims distinguish means-to-ends behavior from cause-and-effect events.

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This circularity is common to all selves. We all channel work into regenerating our ability to channel work. Our fundamental means are our capacity to channel work. Our fundamental end is regenerating our capacity to channel work. These are a self's ends and means, but collective ends and means are different.

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Selves somehow have the capacity to regenerate their own selfhood throughout an individual life and, before dying, to pass their selfhood on to offspring.

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At death, the self is gone and with it the capacity for self-regeneration. The capacity for self-regeneration is what it means to be a living self. Self-regeneration is the difference between life and death.

Here, I'll assume that selves are real and that selfhood encompasses far more than self-awareness, consciousness, ego, or any other psychological characteristics. I'll regard all living beings - and most important for solving the mystery of purpose, the very first living beings - as selves.

Selfhood is what's constant throughout any life despite the matter and energy coming and going throughout a self's body despite changes to character, learning, growing, and aging, or the gain and loss of faculties and even body parts over a lifetime.

Selfhood is also the constant throughout the natural history of life on earth from the first, preevolutionary self forward. Selfhood is what has been passed on from generation to generation continuously for 3.8 billion years.

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To face the mystery squarely, I'll use the term self, despite its psychological connotations. I broaden the class of all selves in order to jog us out of an intellectual habit that has ungrounded philosophy and science for millennia, the assumption that the mystery of purpose applies chiefly or exclusively to human selves. It doesn't. Purpose only applies to selves, but selves include all living beings.

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Still, Deacon recognizes that purposeful behavior doesn't emerge with human consciousness but must have emerged at the very origin of life. The mystery of purpose must be solved with an explanation of selves broadly defined to encompass all of us, not just humans. To Deacon: "Self is, in all cases, the origin, target, and beneficiary of functional organization. Thus, there is good reason to believe that by first exploring self at its most basic level we may be able to discern some fundamental principles that will apply as we build our analysis upward toward themost complex phenomena of selfhood: human consciousness."

Emergent regularization results when countertendencies impede one another. We see this in the whirlpool’s turbulent currents getting in one another’s way. Is it possible that self-regeneration emerges from countertendencies between underlying emergent regularizing processes?

That’s what Deacon imagines as the origin of the first self.

He pictures two emergent regularizing tendencies working for and against each other such that each prevents the other’s tendency toward degeneration. He demonstrates how two emergent regularization dynamics (known as autocatalysis and self-assembly) can be synergistically coupled such that they constrain each other’s tendency to degenerate.

The result is a higher-level emergent constraint, an emergent constraint that further constrains the two underlying emergent regularization dynamics. This higher-level emergent constraint results in a tendency to continually regenerate itself by eliminating or constraining the lower-level emergent regularization tendencies toward degeneration. Deacon calls his model for this emergent self an autogen, in other words, a “self-generator.”

Later, I’ll show how the autogen achieves all of the capacities required for self-regeneration: self-repair, self-protection, self-reproduction, and selective interaction. I’ll also present Deacon’s speculations about the autogen’s first evolvable traits, including the incorporation of information-bearing molecules.

The autogen is a thought experiment intended as a proof of principle that true selves with real aims can emerge within basic physics and chemistry. Unlike many thought experiments, this one is empirically testable.

As the simplest instance of spontaneous emergent self-regeneration, the autogen has true purpose—not purpose for the universe or for some other entity that wills it, not purpose that we as outside observers imagine by equivocation, and not purpose it has chosen for itself, but rather emergent purpose, purpose that emerges by chance chemistry.

The autogen, a spontaneous chemical process, nonetheless engages in self-directed work. It is an identifiable locus of self-control or agency, the means by which it can self-regenerate.

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But what if, unlike all known selves, the first selves didn’t have to be consistently contained? If so, we could overcome these bugs—indeed, turn them into features. Picture, then, Deacon’s model for the first selves, which he calls autogens (self-generators).

Like the autopoietic unit, the autogen is a coupling of autocatalysis and container formation. Its autocatalysis produces, as a by-product, capsid molecules that, through emergent regularization, assemble into capsids, shells like those that we find as viral capsules today.

Unlike the autopoietic unit, the autogen is closed sometimes within the capsid shell, and open at other times. When contained, no reactants enter or exit and the autocatalytic set is dormant. When the container is broken open in the presence of reactants, autocatalysis resumes, producing more catalysts and capsid molecule by-products. These by-product molecules regularize, forming capsid shells amid the autocatalytic process. Some of these shells would encapsulate a sampling of the locally produced members of the autocatalytic set.

While the autopoietic unit depends on autocatalysis going on within an always-closed container, the autogen does not. Inside the closed autogen the catalysts are dormant. With the autogen, autocatalysis occurs only when the container is broken, just where and when second law tendencies are likely to dissipate the molecules that recontainment depends upon and therefore just where the regeneration of catalysts and capsid molecules is most beneficial.

In the autogen model, the lack of a selective permeable container is not a flaw but a feature crucial for self-protection, a way in which the dynamics can lock down a dormant sampling of the autocatalytic set that can persist even in nonsupportive environments lacking reactants.

Since, when open and active, autocatalysis might produce a lot of capsid molecules, and therefore capsids, it is able to self-reproduce proliferating varied “offspring,” in that the multiple containers are likely and each could encapsulate a varied sample from the catalytic set and possibly other molecules sampled from the environment.

With the autogen, the challenge of achieving selective interaction is solved not with highly improbable selective permeability arising by chance in an abiotic environment, but through its alternation between open and closed phases. The open phase achieves self-repair and reproduction. The closed phase achieves self-protection.

In the closed phase, the encapsulation and its contained catalysts would be a bit like dormant seeds. I’ll call them seeds here, though keeping in mind that this is a metaphoric use of the term. The seeds would contain a varied yet potentially representative sampling of the autocatalytic set. If broken later in the presence of more reactants, autocatalysis would resume producing yet more seeds.

By alternating between an open and a closed phase, the autogen builds up and locks down its regularities, repairing and reproducing them for a time and then protecting them in seeds. Autogens would be evolvable. They would have heredity and variation and would thus be subject to natural selection.

FIGURE 6 Minimal autogen. When broken by chance interaction (with large molecule M), autocatalytic set X and Y converts available reactants into more Xs, Ys, and Cs (capsid molecules), which regularize into new “seeds,” encapsulations containing varied samplings of Xs and Ys.

To illustrate, imagine autocatalytic set X and Y converting reactants into more Xs and Ys plus capsid molecule by-products C. Right where autocatalysis is generating lots of Xs and Ys. Capsid molecules would self-assemble into capsids containers. Some of these containers would end up encapsulating varied samplings of catalysts X and Y. Local reactant would be depleted by autocatalysis but not before seeds were produced.

Seeds might break open again elsewhere, or in the same area once reactants had been replenished by diffusion from elsewhere. They would break by happenstance, chance interactions with things outside the encapsulations. When they opened, if reactants are present, autocatalysis would resume, regenerating and replenishing catalysts and capsids, thus producing more seeds.

Deacon argues that an autogen is a synergistic coupling that achieves true self-regeneration, thereby providing a testable proof of concept that it is possible to solve the mystery of purpose relying solely on conventional physical science.

NOT THE MATERIAL OBJECT BUT THE CONSTRAINED DYNAMIC TENDENCIES

The autogen cycles between two phases, open and closed, due to the synergistic coupling between the two emergent regularization dynamics—autocatalysis and capsid formation. In the open phase, autocatalysis regenerates seeds. Since autocatalysis is far more likely to restart from a cluster of catalysts than from an individual catalyst, containment constrains the likelihood that autocatalysis will end with catalysts dissipating, never to autocatalyze again.

Given materialist intuitions, it might seem right to identify only the encapsulated catalysts as the autogen. After all, the seed is a material object that most resembles a body. Or one might assume that an autogen can’t be a self since it’s not continuously contained. When open, it’s nothing but a constellation of independent catalysts.

When seeds break open, there is just a loose constellation of independent molecules. This may seem like nothing more than autocatalysis but it’s actually autocatalysis that, due to the constraining effects of capsule formation, tends toward recontainment.

The autogen thus self-regenerates by means of its cycle: open self-repair and self-reproduction tending toward closed self-protection, and closed self-protection tending toward open self-repair and self-reproduction. An autogen is neither the closed nor the open phase but the tendency to close when opened and open when closed.

In very loose parallel, a sunflower isn’t the seed phase or the plant phase but the complementary tendency to alternate between the phases. The autogen is even a little like the chicken and egg. Regardless of which comes first, we identify the pair of alternating phases as a self within a lineage of selves.

The autogen is the tendency when closed a self to open, and when open to close. In other words the autogen self is the tendency to self-regenerate by means of a constrained cyclic tendency.

In contrast to the widespread differentiation in Western philosophy between material reality as the realm of unfreedom and that of the human mind as the realm of freedom, here, all living beings are understood to possess minimal intelligence, subjective agency and autonomy. This subjective agency is grounded in the assumption that all organisms strive to maintain themselves. This energy directed towards self-preservation implies that not only do all organisms have interests and values (e.g. staying alive and reproducing the species), but they also have a minimal sense of self (e.g. the maintenance of one’s own life) (Weber and Varela 2002, 116-119). This is not to say that organisms are self-conscious, but rather that they are sentient beings with a minimal, embodied sense of self. The foundation of an organism’s autonomy therefore does not lie in self-reflexive thought, but in sentience, which enables organisms to give meaning to the world through their embodied and intentional interpretation thereof (Weber 2016, Narby 2006, Hoffmeyer 1993, Kauffman 1993). For biosemioticist Jesper Hoffmeyer, this process of embodied cognition is inherently linked to the capability of living beings to anticipate the future. To explain this issue with some simple examples, I quote Hoffmeyer in full here:

“Quite generally, living systems have evolved a capacity for making anticipations: they must decide when to grow and when to withhold growth, when to move, when to hide, when to sing, and so on, and this way of adjusting the behaviour depends on a capacity to predict the future at least to some limited extent. For instance: is it likely the sun will shine or not, is it likely that little flies will pass by if I make my web here, will the predator be fooled away from the nest if I pretend to have a broken wing etc. Of course, in most cases it will be the instinctual system of the animal rather than the brain that makes this kind of prediction, but the logic is the same: the animal profits from its ability (whether acquired through phylogeny or through ontogeny) to identify trustworthy regularities in the surroundings. And most – if not all – trustworthy regularities are indeed relations. For instance, the relation between length of daylight and the approaching springtime that tells the beech when to burst into leafs; or the play of sun and shadows which tells the spider where to construct its web; or the relation between clumsy movements and an easy catch that tells the predator which individual prey animal to select, and thus tells the bird how to fool the predator away from its nest” (Hoffmeyer 2008, 34-5).

Considering these basic interpretative interactions of all living beings with their environment, organisms should then not be understood as “genetic machines” but as “materially embodied [cognitive; LP] processes that bring themselves forth” (Weber 2013, 30). Or, to put it somewhat tautologically: Self-organization implies that living organisms are alive.